Illinois State Championship

2/26/2016 - 2/27/2016 at Elgin Community College

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Team did great and had fun, even with some adversity... judges were harsh on hanging, we had to make some tweaks. Autonomous didn't work well since the night before the toolchest fell on the robot, and it was a little off. We ultimatley abandoned autonomous since we need a revised hang mechanism to deal with the judges interpretation of hanging rules, and it did not fit with the 18" box when initialized in autonomous. So we opted for hanging over autonomous. However, ultimately getting our highest scores this season. In summary, overall, the team had their best showing yet...

in performance, presentation, and message. The team made their presentation very well.
They did a fine job delivering it, and answering the questions

Highlights

Heading to Nationals!!

- Our highest score to date was achieved in our 5th match of the day (282)
- Our high score was 3rd highest of all in the the championship
- We had the highest Ranking Points for the championship (656) more than any other team (cumulative scores)
- Despite that, we finished only 18th out of 36 (this is because we lost a few matches, but were high scoring matches)
- We made it to the finals again... 3rd place team Octopi picked us as a partner
- Our alliance lost in the semi-finals
- We won the "Connect" award!
- 8 teams advanced to Nationals (there are 4 across the country, called SuperRegionals), we were the 5th pick (due to Connect Award)!
- We struggled a little with picky judges and what constitutes a valid hang, but we innovated on the fly, and finished strong
- See our scores

day-before Inspections and Presentation

This was all done the night before the big day.
We had the robot thoroughly inspected, field tested, and qualified.
We then made our presentation.
Afterwhich, we hung around, talked to other teams and coaches, and began
strategizing for our next day. We also need to further inspect our robot
ourselves since we dropped the toolchest on it, which caused some issues
with it running straight.
Team did a fine job presenting.





Retesting Night Before

We needed to further test our robot
since we dropped the toolchest on it during the drive to the presentation,
which caused some issues with it running straight. We did the best we could,
but the robot was not perfectly straight anymore.




Opening Ceremony


Matches

We competed 5 times. We got better as the day wore on
(and we further innovated the robot for the judging
conditions... they needed more clarity on the hang!).


Hanging Out

Being there from 7:30am to 6:00pm, there was a lot
of down time in between, where we met other judges, fixed things, tweaked
our robot, tested, talked to otehr teams and just generally hung out.


Finals

We were picked by the 3rd place team (Octopi)
as an alliance partner in the finals. We lost 222 to 228 (so close), because
the referrees judged Octopi's climb as not valid, even though we thought it was
(ours was valid and scored, but Octopi's they said wasn't hanging even
though everybody thought it was... so close!)


Finishing Up

Team huddle at the very end.


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